Much of ‘cancel culture’ is unserious – but its effect on us all is deadly

It’s a short road from an opinion to a death threat nowadays. With the rise of social media, there is more speech than there has ever been, and that is admirable. But it is hard to navigate something so novel. Last week, Harper’s Magazine published an open letter on free speech. It was signed by 150 intellectuals including Salman Rushdie, Martin Amis, Garry Kasparov and Margaret Atwood. It acknowledged “powerful protests for racial and social justice”, but also said, “this needed reckoning has also intensified a new set of moral attitudes and political commitments that tend to weaken our norms of open debate and toleration of differences in favour of ideological conformity”.

The authors worried that “the free exchange of information and ideas, the lifeblood of a liberal society, is daily becoming more constricted”. They fretted about “an intolerance of opposing views, a vogue for public shaming and ostracism, and the tendency to dissolve complex policy issues in a blinding moral certainty”.

This is “cancel culture” – the phenomenon where, if someone says something you think appalling, you not only protest but also seek to remove the perpetrator’s livelihood, and sometimes their life. Physical threats are often dismissed because they are “online”. No one can write freely from a place of terror, and violence will jump off the internet and into life.

Supporters of “cancel culture” say it only affects the guilty: the racists; the misogynists; the incompetent elites. They call it an instrument of justice, which will make the world a safer place. They say this kind of freedom of speech is freedom to abuse, and dominate. Their particular example is JK Rowling, whose position on transgender rights is considered disgraceful by some. It may be disgraceful, but who can learn wisdom from one side of an argument? You cannot have a conclusion without an argument.

When dealing with the undecided, a blunt characterisation of your enemy as wicked is not good enough. The British Left should have learnt this from the Corbyn experiment. They refused to engage with the reality of a parliamentary democracy, which requires persuasion, not abuse, and they lost. It is comforting to always be agreed with, but the removal of your enemy does not remove your enemy’s idea. It stays there, until it is rebutted. If it is not rebutted, it will never leave. Look for it at election time.

I accept the reasoning of cancel culture – an internet pile-on can and does topple a predator – but, when Margaret Atwood, a visionary feminist, and Salman Rushdie, who faced death when The Satanic Verses was published, tell me they are fearful for public discourse, I listen. A novelist is not a king. They do not inherit power; they think their way to it. The children of the internet may not like it – there is much Oedipal chomping in their language – but Atwood and Rushdie earned their pedestals. To call them abusers is dishonest.

I hope I am no friend to racists and women-haters, but I fear the eradication of the conversation

more than I fear either one side or the other. When debate is impossible, what is left? We still live in liberal democracies, though imperfect ones, and they cannot survive without debate. To have debate, you must be willing to hear things that alarm and disgust you. That is the social contract. Without it, there will be no discourse left. What will thrive then?

You might ask me, since I am a Jew: would I ban the sale of Mein

Kampf? Or The Protocols of the

Elders of Zion? Of course not. I trust in the mechanisms of a liberal society. I trust that these ideas, when offered up, will be annihilated, because the alternative is terrifying.

I was the subject of an internet pile-on a year ago, when I criticised Nike for introducing an obese mannequin – in over-cruel language, it is true – and called it cynical. I was told I was wrong, which I did not mind, and was threatened with death, which I did. This may not be where cancel culture begins – it begins as a cry for justice – but it is certainly where it ends. No plea for compassion is convincing when allied with a death threat.

But much of cancel culture is unserious; a game in which people seek to find fellowship by excluding people perceived to be their enemies. There was an attempt last week to “cancel” the actress Jodie Comer, because she may be in a relationship with a Republican. I enjoy Comer’s work. I have no right to care who she is sleeping with.

I hope these battles are only the birth throes of the powerful new media. Even so, I fear that if speech is over-regulated, a genuine tyranny will rise, because there will be nothing for the liberal society to defend itself with. And we will only look back at the door we closed so glibly and wonder – how?

Sorry, but a blunt characterisation of your enemy as ‘wicked’ is not good enough